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I used Claude Code to get a second opinion on my MRI

antoine.fi

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Re: I used Claude Code to get a second opinion on my MRI

#401

Post by microgpt »

close04 wrote: post #226
microgpt wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate to break it to you but death is certain for everyone. Properly emotionally processing this fact and your complete inability to do anything about it is called an "existential crisis" and if you haven't had one or several yet, you will.

I’m not sure what the “revelation” is? How is this related to what I said? Putting that aside, your philosophy sounds shallow. Death is certain, but how long you have to live and the quality of that life are not predefined. An incompetent passenger-pilot trying to save you from a crash will at worst make no difference. But an incompetent doctor can teach you that death isn’t necessarily the worst outcome.

There are many healthy psychological ways to accept the certainty of eventual death. But the process is inevitably painful.

I think the different ways people accept death explains a lot of people's psychology, like how you can guess people's attachment styles or Freudian stage fixation. For instance, billionaires who pour all their money into anti-aging research clearly are not handling it well.

Re: I used Claude Code to get a second opinion on my MRI

#402

Post by microgpt »

thfuran wrote: post #215
microgpt wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty easy to display one thing to verified browsers (just latest few user-agents from the 10ish different mainstream browsers on the 3 main OSes) and another to anything else. Yes AI scrapers can easily spoof user-agent, but they fall out of date as the browser updates. Bit harder to catch them in tarpits and then serve nonsense to whoever ever triggered the tarpit.

>Yes AI scrapers can easily spoof user-agent, but they fall out of date as the browser updates. It’s a hell of a lot easier for a company to ensure that its scrapers all report the latest user agent string than it is to get everyone and their mother to update their browsers in a timely fashion.

yeah but unless everyone is checking the version, if it's just a handful of websites checking it, they don't.

and browsers forcibly auto-update

Re: I used Claude Code to get a second opinion on my MRI

#403

Post by brokencode »

lazide wrote: post #390
brokencode wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are so many better data sources that AI labs can use here that this argument really holds no water at all. Peer reviewed journals, textbooks, in-house teams of experts, trusted news publications, etc. The whole idea of scraping large swaths of the internet for training data has always been pretty dubious due to the variable data quality. I mean, just look at the early Google models that told people to put glue…

But they don’t, generally. Which is why it is a great argument, because it’s easy to falsify - and see it is what is actually happening. Also, those other sources are getting buried in AI slop too.

The question is not whether it has happened or will continue to happen. Of course it will always be a problem to some extent.

Your original claim is that this will be enough of a problem to prevent models from improving in expert level knowledge. I completely disagree with this premise.

If the models fail to improve, it will likely be due to limitations in the transformer architecture rather than poisoned training data.

And even then, I doubt that the transformer is the best architecture we will ever come up with.

Clearly it doesn’t learn or think like a human does, since humans don’t need many gigabytes of text samples to learn to talk, so there is some room for improvement.

Re: I used Claude Code to get a second opinion on my MRI

#404

Post by ahepp »

Bratmon wrote: post #278
AceJohnny2 wrote: post #117

> There's something incredibly peaceful about being in the hands of an expert you trust. [...] AI can absolutely shatter that feeling in an uncomfortable way [...] but I don't know if I can fully trust AI either. This really is key. We know we can't trust the AI, but at the same time we're also more comfortable asking the AI for clarifications or confronting it. Not having a time-bound appointment or paying by the ho…

To provide a competing point of anecdata: A Gemini diagnosis saved me $3,000 in unnecessary repairs on my Civic.

I would love to hear more about this

Re: I used Claude Code to get a second opinion on my MRI

#405

Post by exmadscientist »

mrlongroots wrote: post #385
piterrro wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think „the diagnosis” is over simplification and lots of professionals would disagree that there’s always a single one. As a patient your goal is to eliminate the symptoms of whatever is going on in your system. Often times there could be many reasons for it and only curing one can help you already. The diagnosis is a help tool to choose the roght curation method. Thus, chasing the „right” diagnosis (whatever that…

> I think „the diagnosis” is over simplification and lots of professionals would disagree that there’s always a single one. "The Diagnosis" does not mean "one root cause". Situation: my car has some unexplained vibrations. 1. Mechanic A says that it is the engine mounts 2. Mechanic B says that it is some weirdness in how the exhaust assembly is hanging to the underbody 3. Mechanic C says that it is just my wife farti…

> There is always one "The Diagnosis".

No, that is not true at all.

This is a kind of thinking a lot of programmers fall prey to. The real world, outside of code, is a very fuzzy and inherently analog place. There is very rarely one in any complex system having a complex problem needing a complex solution. At some point even the definition of diagnosis gets fuzzy.

The best demonstration of this in medicine is probably the DSM-5. What, really, is the difference between Narcissistic Personality Disorder and Borderline Personality Disorder and Generalized Anxiety Disorder? Can they overlap? (Yes.) How do you treat them? (It's not easy.) What about depression: how do you tell if someone has Major Depressive Disorder or Bipolar Depression? (Again: not easy.) In some circumstances the only way to tell the difference between the two is what drugs work: if antidepressants help, it's Major Depression; if mood stabilizers help, it's Bipolar Depression. It's kind of odd to define a One True Diagnosis by "well we fixed it this way, so it must have been that", with no other way to do it, isn't it? (What if both work? What if one works for a while, then the other works? What if treatment with antidepressants induces bipolar (hypo)mania? All of those happen!)

And that's just a few examples.

Re: I used Claude Code to get a second opinion on my MRI

#406

Post by alwa »

energy123 wrote: post #336
jeswin wrote: post #31

I would not trust AI on images. But I once had ChatGPT tell me that an MRI report was very likely to be incorrect based on the text, and offered a different diagnosis. Since it was semi insisting, I visited another doctor who made me do a retest. Long story short, ChatGPT was correct. Again, this is just one single person's experience. So not worth much.

Anecdote but I gave Gemini Pro an image of an individual with Herpes Zoster which the doctor said was something else. Gemini gave the correct diagnosis which allowed for correct treatment and cure. I don't understand why doctors don't prompt LLMs before saying wrong things. Is it ego? I can understand for radiology because you need a specialized convolutional network, but for more knowledge based things...

“A man with a watch knows the time; a man with two watches is never sure.”

I imagine reasons for what you’re asking might include:

* Prompting an LLM is work, and they’re already overworked just doctoring—every conversation with a computer is a conversation you’re not having with a patient;

* They’re probably right more often than they’re wrong;

* “When you hear hooves, think horses, not zebras”: the 15th case today of strep throat is probably strep throat, regardless of today’s 15th falsely-confident LLM weighing-up;

* They tend to have spent many many years honing a clinical intuition that makes an examination, to some degree, hard to articulate fully to the LLM;

* Liability/overdiagnosis: All this stuff is probabilistic. Inevitably, there’s going to be a time when the LLM throws out something I thought unlikely that turns out to be right, and there will be other times when it’s wrong but now I have to document why. How many false leads do I need to chase per one true differential? Does this really compare favorably to seeking a second opinion from another human doctor?

* Not everything needs to make it into the record. Once it’s in the LLM, it’s discoverable and litigable and hackable and permanent;

* Medicine is practiced in very different ways in different contexts—even in this thread, one radiologist routinely orders ultrasounds for soft tissue shoulder problems, and the other medical-world person replying has never heard of such a thing—presumably both within US health care contexts. Some doctors hand out antibiotics like candy, others are more cautious with respect to resistance. What’s right can depend on the time, the place, the clinical setting—more than just the immediate patient-level facts at hand, in ways that become awkward or unwise to express explicitly.

And of course… who’s to say they don’t do LLM-assisted research, in cases where they think it might be helpful?

Re: I used Claude Code to get a second opinion on my MRI

#407

Post by lazide »

brokencode wrote: post #403
lazide wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But they don’t, generally. Which is why it is a great argument, because it’s easy to falsify - and see it is what is actually happening. Also, those other sources are getting buried in AI slop too.

The question is not whether it has happened or will continue to happen. Of course it will always be a problem to some extent. Your original claim is that this will be enough of a problem to prevent models from improving in expert level knowledge. I completely disagree with this premise. If the models fail to improve, it will likely be due to limitations in the transformer architecture rather than poisoned training da…

https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/01/its-remarkably-easy-...

Re: I used Claude Code to get a second opinion on my MRI

#408

Post by unholiness »

nicksergeant wrote: post #355
pickleRick243 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's like people who expect ChatGPT to be really good at chess because chess engines with super-human performance have been around for decades, so obviously the latest frontier LLM that took billions to train should find the task trivial. Actually, I'm curious what ChatGPT 5.5's ELO is- I wouldn't be too surprised if it's 2000+ just from its basic understanding of chess principles from all the content it has digested…

Interestingly LLMs are extremely bad at chess position _images_. I have to imagine if you give it positions in text it'd be pretty great but when I was learning chess and pasting images of positions in for analysis I couldn't believe how wrong it was. I actually thought it was looking at the board in reverse but even when pointing out problems it seemed completely incapable of understanding what it was missing (of co…

> I have to imagine if you give it positions in text it'd be pretty great

Not at all? LLMs are a terrible match for the kind of analysis a chess engine does (scaled deep search, deeply trained position evaluations). It's just not that kind of tool.

Re: I used Claude Code to get a second opinion on my MRI

#409

Post by acheron »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #79
sxg wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In certain circumstances, the answer is yes. If an airplane's pilots are incapacitated, do you simply give up and crash the plane because there are no other pilots on board? Or would you rather have someone on the ground try to coach a passenger into at least attempting to land the plane?

As long as that passenger didn’t have the fish.

Yes, I remember, I had lasagna.

Re: I used Claude Code to get a second opinion on my MRI

#410

Post by brokencode »

lazide wrote: post #407
brokencode wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question is not whether it has happened or will continue to happen. Of course it will always be a problem to some extent. Your original claim is that this will be enough of a problem to prevent models from improving in expert level knowledge. I completely disagree with this premise. If the models fail to improve, it will likely be due to limitations in the transformer architecture rather than poisoned training da…

https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/01/its-remarkably-easy-...

Great, an article about Llama 2 from early 2025. That doesn’t at all invalidate what I said.
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